If you work at a digital agency, an eCommerce brand, or run a business that manages its own website, it’s likely you’ve experienced the dreaded “hosting migration” at some point. Your experience of a migration may have been positive (hopefully) or negative (eek), but generally the decision to migrate to a new platform is one made with the long term in mind – it’s not the kind of thing that you want to be doing regularly!
In many ways moving host is much like moving to a new house. You want it done with the least possible disruption to your life, and without unnecessary expense and stress.
At Prostack, we know that every migration is different and should be treated as unique. We’ve heard countless horror stories from customers, where migrations have resulted in lost data, extended downtime, lost orders and clumps of pulled hair- a nightmare everyone is surely keen to avoid – so it’s important to know that there are very simple processes to avoid all of these headaches.
We’ve seen cases where customers have been so terrified of the complexity, potential disruption and sheer stress of a migration that they stay with their existing host, sometimes choosing to put up with slow speeds, slow support, network outages and a provider they’d really prefer not to work with anymore. It doesn’t have to be like that.
So what makes for a successful migration?
Without dipping too far into our trade secrets, the key aspects to consider are:
Scan and plan
At Prostack, we have learnt that an audit of all your hardware, software, domain name and DNS, as well as having a clear idea of your main objectives make migrating a site much less painful. Thats why we offer a free auditing service, where we examine your existing services, before creating a customised migration plan that will work best for you.
Avoid sour grapes
Believe it or not, some hosts will do everything they can to make it as difficult as possible for you to move your services away, so you should always finish a migration before cancelling your old service. To remove this headache, Prostack offer free managed hosting for the duration of a migration, so migration work can take the time it needs to be done properly and you don’t have to worry about doubling your hosting fees during the crossover period.
Test, Test then Test again
Unless it’s an absolute emergency to move your services, testing is a crucial phase of any hosting migration. The only way to ensure there are no nasty surprises once websites are moved, is to test copies of them on your new server. Prostack provide simple, step-by-step instructions, to enable you to test your sites prior to switching. You should test absolutely everything, including website forms, admin back end functionality. Make a note of any issues you find so they can be fixed. When it comes to testing, more is more. The more testing you do, the best chance you’ll have for a pain free migration.
Schedule a maintenance window
Picking a quiet time to migrate is always recommended. Take extra care when migrating dynamic sites where data changes regularly. Enforce a change freeze, or place sites into maintenance mode to ensure no data is changed while being copied to the new server. This is particularly important for ecommerce sites. It’s critical that order taking is paused during migration to prevent “split brained” databases, with orders going the website on both old and new servers.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew
If your migration involves transfers of a lot of websites, databases, or email accounts, don’t feel that you have to move everything in one go. Processing manageable batches generally means more care can be taken and mistakes are less likely.
Tips to ensure the fastest DNS changes
Well in advance of your DNS changes, see if you can adjust TTL (Time to live) values on the records you’re going to change. This will help reduce the time your changes need to populate to other DNS servers around the world.
When you repoint services to your new server, it’s always quickest to update DNS records on existing nameservers, rather than changing the nameservers themselves to your new provider. We have a few tricks up our sleeve to help speed up this process too.
We always recommend editing existing DNS records first, and then 24 hours after these updates have been applied and only if necessary, updating nameservers.
Ready to make the switch?
Talk to our team to find out how we can help migrate your services to one of our fully managed hosting solutions. From there we can arrange a free audit and migration planning consultation.
